25

Her Last Day in America

Doing something special for someone isn’t a hard thing to think of. It’s more about getting over the nervousness of doing what your instincts say. Some things really don’t need too much planning. They just need getting over nerves.

Of course, some things really do need a lot of planning. Like going to live and study in another country.

Even if I hadn’t really meant to do it, going to Paris really became all I thought about for months. It even made the other things I was upset about with community college go away.

There was the shopping. My mother insisted on getting me, the California boy, a parka. I insisted that there was no need, I’d seen pictures of Paris and they were always sunny and warm. Mom’s insistence won out, however, and thank goodness for that. She was right.

There was the language. I’d finished my two years of high school French in my sophomore year, and had figured that short of a jaunt up to Canada, I’d never really need to know French, ever. Now I was cramming more than I ever did in school.

There was the paperwork. Signing up for an International Student ID is a pain in the ass. It made getting a passport look easy. You had to fill out this form, submit that form, photocopy in triplicate and sign each one separately. All for a little clown-colored card that I was halfway sure I could’ve photoshopped.

But most of all, there was the planning. Sera and I had already begun getting closer when we both found out about the Europe trips, but this guaranteed we’d be seeing more of each other. She was doing all the research about Germany, and things we could do for day trips. I did the research on Paris, looking at schedules for the opera and all the different sightseeing to do. We were having a lot of fun as November and December rolled by.

Of course, a surprise had to hit, and it hit right after Christmas.

In that week between Christmas and New Year’s, we were planning to get together and finalize a few things for our first trips to see each other. She was leaving in mid-January, with me following her in early February, and I’d gotten my itinerary and class schedules, so the plans were getting very real. We’d packed, and already arranged our passports so we could go to Germany and France respectively. Everything seemed ready to go.

But when the day came for us to get together and plan things, she called me and said she couldn’t get together.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she told me on the phone.

I was a little surprised, to put it mildly. “What happened?” I asked.

“My brother is shipping out to Yugoslavia right after the new year, and I want to get out there and see him before he goes,” she said. “It won’t affect me staying there and all. I’ll still live with Katrina and be going to school.”

“That…” I didn’t have words to explain how I felt, without sounding too much like an idiot, or giving too much away. “I hope your brother’ll be okay.”

“He will be, he won’t be leaving the base out there or anything, or going into any battle zones,” she said. “So yeah, I can’t get together tonight. I’m going to spend it with my mom, and Enrique, and the girls.”

“Yeah, I can understand that,” I said.

“We can still talk about plans once I get out there. I mean, you can call me…”

“At three bucks a minute,” I deadpanned.

“…Or you could write me letters. I’ll write you,” Sera said. “And once you get to Paris, it’ll be cheaper to call me.”

“You know,” I said, “you really need to catch on to this email thing.”

“I need to get a computer first,” she countered.

“Yeah, I know. I’m just going to miss you,” I said.

“I’m going to miss you too,” she said, with a little pout. There was a moment of silence.

“So when are you leaving tomorrow?” I asked, to break the awkwardness.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to try to catch a standby flight to New York, and then on to Frankfurt from there. But I’ll have to be at the airport by 5 a.m., and I might not get out at all tomorrow. I just have to wait until a flight opens up for me.”

We talked a little bit from there, agreeing that the first weekend I was out there, she would be taking the train to see me. It was a bit of a stretch, considering that I didn’t know who my roommate would be, and didn’t know if they’d be accepting of a platonic female visitor, or any visitor at all of any gender or kind spending the night, but that was a bridge to cross once I found out who he was.

Meanwhile, we said our goodbyes and bon voyages, and hung up so she could go spend some time with her friends. After I hung up, I felt incredibly alone. The day dragged on, and as night came, I found I couldn’t sleep much at all. After I woke up for the fourth or fifth time, I looked at the clock. It said it was 5:30 a.m., and I knew what I needed to do, and I was way too tired to overthink it.

So I got dressed to go to the airport.

I wanted to get her something, and considering I was expecting Enrique to be there, flowers were out. I wanted to get her something that would be a unique memory of me, and of California, so I grabbed one of the small stuffed dolphins that I used to collect as a kid that she had commented on once.

Now, this was a significantly different time when it came to air travel than it is these days. It was before 9/11, so it didn’t matter whether you had a ticket, you could go to the gates to meet passengers as they came off of their planes, or sit with people waiting to go. The plan in my very tired mind was to go to SFO and find the flight leaving to New York to find her.

Unfortunately, there was one flaw in my plan. She hadn’t told me what airline she was taking.

There were two terminals that served domestic flights, and they were on opposite sides of the circular building that was San Francisco International Airport. It didn’t take me long to realize as I started looking for flights out to New York that I was about to do a lot of walking.

But it was what I had to do. I started at one end of the airport, and made the walk out to the first set of gates, then back and to the next, over and over again. Each gate had its own security to walk through, and a long way out to the planes.

It took more than half an hour to go from one end of the airport to the other. Sure enough, there she was in the very last set of gates I got to. The terminal was nearly devoid of people, so it wasn’t hard to see the group at the end of one of the terminals. It was a round hub with several gates connecting to it, but the center of the hub had no seats. There, Sera and a group of friends were sitting on the ground, laughing and chatting. I approached, not trying to be quiet, but not making a lot of noise.

Sera saw me first. The look on her face when she saw me was one of my favorite moments of all those years. She just looked up, and sort of smiled but sort of didn’t. It was a look of almost contentment, almost like she had gotten confirmation of something she already knew. Without a word, she stood up from the group, stepped over a pair of her friends and walked towards me, embracing me in a big hug and with no words. I picked her up as I hugged her.

“Thank you,” she whispered into my ear.

“Anytime,” I whispered back.

I let her go, and she brought me over to her friends, most of whom I knew already from high school, including Enrique and Rachelle.

We sat there for hours, waiting for that flight and to see if Sera would make the list. It was a bit awkward, since they were Sera’s friends, a group I’d barely gotten to know, even in high school.

At one point, I sat off to the side as people broke off, and Sera was sitting with Enrique. Sera’s mother came over to me.

“So you’re Joseph,” she said to me.

“Guilty as charged,” I said.

“You know, I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.

“I hope nothing too terrible,” I said, looking at her. I wasn’t sure how to take this exchange.

“Nothing too bad, no,” she said. She looked back at the young couple sitting together. “You know, I was pretty surprised when she told me you wouldn’t be coming out last night.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but then I realized you just weren’t a part of the crowd she hung out with.”

“So, you understand why?”

“I got the reasoning. I still didn’t understand why,” she said.

I looked back at them. “Sera and I are just from two different worlds, two different groups of people.”

Sera’s mother looked back at me. “No, she’s about to go to a different world with a different group of people. You and her were just separate.”

“Separate is a pretty big thing at our age, I think,” I said.

“Oh, it is,” she agreed. “Everything’s big at your age, but sometimes, I wonder if that’s why people your age are motivated to try and overcome it. People my age just let things be.”

She got up and left me with those words.

By the time the sun had come up, a couple of planeloads of people had come and gone, but our little powwow remained. Not long after the sunrise, passengers with actual tickets for New York began to arrive and check in. All we could do was sit back and watch. There were lots of people, and it looked like a very full plane.

Finally, the clerks at the desk began calling the standby names. She was second on the list. Our group let out a cheer and standing ovation that left all her future co-passengers more than a little startled.

After that, things moved very fast. She began to pack her things up, and the last goodbyes were given. At the last moment, she pulled that little dolphin out of her backpack and stuck it into her jacket pocket. She gave me the last hug and asked, “See you in a few weeks?”

“You bet,” I said.

She got on the runway and turned at the door to wave. Once she was in the tunnel, a few people began to head off. I waited at the window, and watched the plane until it pulled away, and as it waited to get onto the runway. Sera’s mother came up to the window and watched with me.

“So you were that surprised I wasn’t coming?” I asked her, as the plane taxied onto the runway.

“Oh, I knew you were coming. I was just surprised that she didn’t invite you,” she said.

Sera’s plane took off and banked to the east, and soon it was out of sight from our window. Sera’s mother hugged me and gave her best to Sera’s other friends as she left. The few of us who stayed the longest began to leave as well.

As I headed back to the garage to my car, I ended up walking for a while with Rachelle and a couple of other girls.

“You used to like Caitlyn Shackleford, right?” she asked me as we walked.

“Um, yeah,” I said. That was the most personal, and possibly only direct question that she had ever asked me.

“Whatever happened with that?” she asked.

“Um, nothing, really,” I said. Of course, I didn’t mention the things we’d been doing that fall, but I didn’t think it was necessary.

“How’d you know where we were?” she asked.

“She told me she was flying out today,” I said.

“She didn’t even know what gate it was until we got here,” Rachelle said.

“Neither did I. She didn’t even tell me the airline,” I said.

“So you just happened to guess the right gate?” she asked.

“Well, it wasn’t my first guess. More like tenth. I just kept guessing.”

“It’s a big airport,” she said.

“Not too big,” I said.

“You’re crazy,” another girl that was there said. “I can’t imagine doing something like that.”

I just shrugged. Rachelle and her friends seemed to accept that, and we got into the elevator. When her floor came up, she and the other girls stepped out. She stopped before getting out the door and said, “I hope you guys have fun in Paris.”

“I know we will,” I uncharacteristically said with confidence.